REPORTER: You have just homed in on Prime Minister John Howard's backyard in Canberra. These images are publicly available. Four Corners could easily have chosen a celebrity's backyard - Nicole Kidman or David Wenham - and anyone in the space business knows it won't be long before these images move in further.
Is it fair to say that satellites are the eyes and ears in space?
DAVID RYAN: And they may even be developing a sense of smell.
JIM BENSON: They can see and hear everything.
REPORTER: So I mean --
JIM BENSON: They really can read newspapers over people's shoulders from space.
REPORTER: Outer space is no longer the exclusive realm of astronomers, astrologers and science fiction. It's the new high ground from which our lives are now run. From space orbits 36,000 kilometres away, communicators put people in contact with each other and missiles in contact with their targets.
DR JIM GARVIN: Space is a frontier. It's tangible, it's there and stuff happens, and we are in our bloody infancy of understanding it.
REPORTER: Space is also open for business for entrepreneurs with the right stuff.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Three years from now we'll be sending paying passengers into space. We'll be sending them - you know, our spaceships will be launching every day.
STEVEN FREELAND: Are there things that we should be doing and in a sense things that we should not be doing as we move forward into this frontier? These are questions, very difficult questions.
REPORTER: Tonight on Four Corners, the powerbrokers of outer space - operating in a new and almost lawless frontier.
Mary Ann Elliott is living the American Dream.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: I think the capital and everything is so pretty.
REPORTER: A former beauty queen and mother at 15, she now knows more about satellite communications than most people on the planet. She is a celebrity in the mysterious space business and a powerful player in Washington circles.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Our work with the US Government has fuelled our growth.
REPORTER: Just how much have you grown?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Over the last five years, we've grown 1,061 per cent.
REPORTER: Elliott is a space broker. Her company, Arrowhead Global Solutions, makes $100,000,000 a year, buying and selling airtime on communication satellites. And in a post-September 11 world, with a new focus on national security, that business is highly competitive.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Well, in the DC area we're called the Beltway Bandits and --
REPORTER: So this is the private sector --
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Yes.
REPORTER: Working for the federal government on - on national security?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Yes, yes absolutely, and it can be Lockheed Martin, Boeing has major presence here, Booz Allen and Hamilton, Bering Point.
REPORTER: Tonight the Beltway Bandits, their clients and competitors from across the globe are celebrating an astronomical year of business. Washington's satellite gala night is a who's who of the space business; powerful interests all cashing in.
M.C. LEADING TOAST: To our customers, long may they spend.
REPORTER: There are few household names here, but space is now the realm of big multinationals run by a new generation of high flyers like Eric Beranger, the chief executive of Space Services for Europe's largest aerospace company.
How much money is involved in space these days?
ERIC BERANGER: Wow, you mean worldwide? More than 30,000,000,000 in the US, and in Europe about a fifth of this, so between $5,000,000,000 and $6,000,000,000.
REPORTER: Per year?
ERIC BERANGER: Per year, yes.
REPORTER: Yet of the thousand guests here tonight, and just what they do, the public is completely in the dark.
If I said 'outer space', what would you think about?
SPEAKER: Star Wars - right? Am I right? Star Wars.
SPEAKER: Outer space?
SPEAKER: Far?
SPEAKER: Aliens.
SPEAKER: New York City.
SPEAKER: Let me think about this psychologically - 'outer space'.
SPEAKER: Planets, stars - everything, really.
SPEAKER: Aliens.
SPEAKER: Aliens.
SPEAKER: The Martians. Can't be more helpful than that, sorry.
SPEAKER: Venus, the Love Planet, I don't know.
SPEAKER: The outer space itself, different shows, right, some people we know, right.
SPEAKER: That's so rude.
REPORTER: In fact, our lives are run from space: banking transactions, retail chains that are networked, trades on the stock market, TV, the internet, international phone calls and GPS tracking. Space is no longer the final frontier; now it's the high frontier, in many cases beyond the reach of international laws and regulations.
A frontier with few laws suits entrepreneurs like Jim Benson. He loves fast cars and fast rockets, and is out to exploit space.
JIM BENSON: Oh, I've been called a space buccaneer. I haven't been called a space cowboy, but I kind of like the image.
REPORTER: The former dot.com guru is now a space entrepreneur in what he says is a $100,000,000,000 a year industry.
JIM BENSON: It's definitely an opportunity to make money and to make a lot of money. I have a slogan: if we want to go to space to stay space has to pay.
REPORTER: From his base in Poway, California, Benson is developing the technology to mine in outer space. His targets? Some of the 100,000,000 asteroids between Earth and Mars - and he's already designed a near-Earth asteroid prospector.
JIM BENSON: If we are going to explore and settle space, the first thing we have to look at is the natural resources. We have to learn to live off the land like the early pioneers did, and the resources are right there ready and waiting for us.
DR JIM GARVIN: There are definitely asteroids - near-Earth objects that cross the Earth's plane that are made 100 per cent of iron nickel. They're as rich as the iron nickel in the great Sudbury mine of Canada, for example. That's great. The question is: what are the economics of getting those things in a useable form back to Earth?
REPORTER: Jim Benson believes he'll have the technology. He plans to send up mining robots that would dig for asteroid ore and load up transporters. All this may seem far-fetched. But, when Jim Benson spoke at a conference in Australia about plans to stake out asteroids as his own private property, he challenged the legal fraternity.
JIM BENSON: Natural resources in space are on a first come, first served basis, and whatever private individual or corporation spends the money and takes the risks to send a robotic representative to a resource-rich body and lands on it and assesses it ought to be able to claim it.
REPORTER: What is the property law situation?
JIM BENSON: The property law situation is that there is no property law situation.
NEIL ARMSTRONG: That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.
REPORTER: The laws of space can't keep up with the cowboys. Law, such as it is, is based on United Nations agreements drafted half a century ago. Even before the famous first steps, the Outer Space Treaty was signed.
STEVEN FREELAND: We call it the Magna Carta, if you like, of space law. It is a treaty which was debated - almost as soon as Sputnik went up in 1957 the international community thought, "Oh, my goodness, we have to do something."
REPORTER: The Outer Space Treaty declares that space belongs to the whole of mankind; no country can own property. But it doesn't mention the private sector. Then in the 1970s, the United Nations drew up the idealistic Moon Agreement.
JIM BENSON: The Moon Agreement called for all profits made in space to be distributed to all countries, especially those in need, and it just was a sort of communistic approach to space that really could have put a complete damper forever on the exploration development of space.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: I mean, he claims he's a company, he's not a country. So he thinks he has a loophole. But the intent of the Moon Agreement was that we're not supposed to do that.
REPORTER: There's not much respect for the United Nations Moon Agreement. None of the big space powers - America, China and Russia - has ratified it.
JIM BENSON: Well, I just can't imagine a SpaceDev mining operation on an asteroid, you know, being attacked by a tank from the United Nations. I mean, what are they going to do?
REPORTER: Celestial real estate has already taken off. This agent is selling the moon for $59 an acre and claims to have 2,000,000 property owners. There's no law to stop this, but there's also no law to enforce moon claims.
US ESTATE AGENT: In 10 years we'll have 40,000,000 property owners on the moon. I guarantee you they will have a voice, and they will yell and scream and let these people know that they don't appreciate the fact that they're on private property.
STEVEN FREELAND: No laws, no domestic laws can be applied if you like unilaterally in space. Therefore, in a sense, there are no property rights that can be claimed by individuals or indeed by states in space because there's no law that actually regulates that.
REPORTER: The legal void in space has made the high frontier a place where it pays to be the biggest and the strongest.
Should we all be worried about this?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: It depends whether you feel that America's on your side or not, because I think America will dominate space and one then has to worry about which president I think is in power in America.
REPORTER: America is now a super power on Earth. Are they a super power in space?
ERIC BERANGER: Yes, definitely.
REPORTER: It's from here, at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, that America is pushing ahead, unconcerned about the lack of space law. Last year President Bush announced expeditions to the moon, Mars and beyond, to the delight of its top rocket man.
DR JIM GARVIN: This is our next Mars probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO. We're launching in August of this year and this is our biggest reconnaissance satellite ever to the red planet. This is of course scaled down by a factor of 15 from the real thing. It will be able to photograph things the size of small children on the surface of Mars, if there were any.
NASA is all about hope - it's a four-letter word - the hope that space will bring something better, something more interesting.
REPORTER: NASA's discoveries have given America superiority in space. It's annual $16,000,000,000 budget allows the private sector and the military to reap rewards.
KIRBY IKIN: That technology is utilised in a number of areas, both commercial, civil and military in some senses. The technologies that we develop through the NASA program end up being spun off into other areas.
REPORTER: There is a view that President Bush may be looking for select partners to support his space ambitions.
KIRBY IKIN: At this unique juncture in time, there's perhaps an imperative for the establishment of a coalition of the willing, if you will, for space exploration. We have the existing strong ties between the US president and our prime minister. It seems to me to present a unique point in time where Australia can participate in this grand exploration venture.
REPORTER: NASA's civilian space program is more than matched by the other force at the high frontier: the US military. It's this that has made Mary Ann Elliott a space millionaire.
America's Defence Daily magazine named Elliott one of the 40 most influential people in global defence. The only other woman was former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: It went very well, except I didn't get the Teleport Developer of the Year award. It went to Caprock out of Houston. They've done a lot and they're very deserving but, compared to what we've accomplished building the 22 Earth stations for DoD at six locations, it certainly pales in comparison.
REPORTER: Mary Ann Elliott sells commercial satellite time to the military. With 140,000 US troops in Iraq alone, the military's 60 satellites aren't enough. It needs the private sector.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: We now represent a significant customer. It's probably between 10 and it may even push beyond 20 per cent of the consumer or customer base for the commercial satcom industry.
REPORTER: Tonight American military pride is on show, but much of the serious space business is secret. Space defence has grown exponentially - a win-win for both client and customer.
REPORTER: You've had Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, Desert Storm.
DAVID HELFGOTT: And also in Kosovo. These were all things that took place as well.
REPORTER: And has the requirement for commercial satellites increased?
DAVID HELFGOTT: Yes.
REPORTER: It can only continue if these kind of operations continue, can't it?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: That's a true statement. That's fair.
REPORTER: America's military use of space has thrown it into conflict with the old Outer Space Treaty. It demands that space can only be developed for peaceful purposes. America argues space can and should be used for national security, and in secret. We asked for a glimpse of Mary Ann Elliott's company's control centre.
Presumably that's where the defence contracts come in and you process them and you deal with things?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: I really cannot comment.
REPORTER: This is a seriously secretive business, isn't it?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Well, it's not that what we're doing is that classified; it's just that if people put all of the pieces of the puzzle together then they would have the full picture.
REPORTER: Do you need to know what that information is that's being transmitted?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: No, we do not.
REPORTER: Do you worry about what's in it at all?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: No, I do not. It is not my concern. It is not our business.
REPORTER: In Los Angeles, Four Corners was allowed a rare look inside the world's largest satellite factory; 1,000,000 square feet of Boeing's applied rocket science. Once complete, at around $200,000,000 apiece, these satellites will be blasted up to 36,000 kilometres into space. There's no room for error. Every solar panel is polished, every wire checked as space-worthy.
DAVID RYAN: And before you fly a satellite that has to be up for 15 years and any given day goes from about 200 degrees Fahrenheit above zero to 200 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and inside you want to keep it at room temperature, it's a very unforgiving environment.
REPORTER: Boeing was keen to show how satellites are improving life on Earth. In the pipeline are next generation weather and GPS satellites, and by 2007 satellites bringing 1,500 high-definition TV channels across the US.
But it's what you don't see that tells another story. Of the 1,000,000 square feet, this was all we were permitted to view. The rest was "need to know", much of it national security. Even the number of employees to the nearest thousand is kept confidential.
What's also secret is the intelligence capability of satellites, which may already threaten our privacy. From a few hundred kilometres up, image satellites, the eyes of space, can home in on any spot on the globe, right down to the yellow cab.
STEVEN FREELAND: Privacy is a difficult issue with space, because domestic privacy law does not necessarily apply.
DAVID RYAN: The typical commercial type of imagery is on the order of one to two metres of resolution on the ground, which is pretty remarkable since these satellites are hundreds of miles up in space.
REPORTER: And can I buy pictures?
DAVID RYAN: You can. You can go on the Internet and you can buy them. There's several companies that offer them.
REPORTER: Four weeks ago, Internet company Google launched a free service for the public. But just what the military's hawks can see is for their eyes only. We do know it's much closer.
DAVID RYAN: You can imagine that it probably is.
REPORTER: But that's classified information, is it?
DAVID RYAN: We're not going to probably talk about that too much.
REPORTER: How high are the resolutions for military satellites now?
ERIC BERANGER: They are not public --
REPORTER: They are not public.
ERIC BERANGER: ... is the answer.
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, it's somewhere under six inches, meaning that you can distinguish two objects six inches apart.
REPORTER: Intelligence expert Jeffrey Richelson does not believe satellites can quite read number plates, but Jim Benson disagrees.
JIM BENSON: You know, if a private sector company can throw up a little satellite that gives you two-foot resolution without breaking into a sweat, then you know that just by extrapolating there's much higher capability out there. They can see and hear everything.
REPORTER: So I mean --
JIM BENSON: They really can read newspapers over people's shoulders from space.
REPORTER: What most agree on is that the power of even commercial satellites will increase.
JEFFREY RICHELSON: They will come down not necessarily to the level that the best intelligence systems have, but they will come down partially because the government wants to be able to buy more commercial imagery of higher quality.
STEVEN FREELAND: I can foresee there being photos splashed on the newspapers of, if you like, famous people from satellite images at some stage, and we just will have to work out how we deal with that.
REPORTER: Privacy laws in individual countries aren't much help. Outer space, where the satellites orbit, is far beyond the boundaries of national laws. What is more, the world hasn't even agreed at what point outer space begins. Quirkily, Australia is the first country to set a limit, at 100 kilometres above sea level.
STEVEN FREELAND: That's the question that every space law student in their first class has great ideas on, and then they're shocked to hear that at least at this moment under international law there's no legally defined, if you like, demarcation between airspace and outer space.
REPORTER: Airspace for aircraft is controlled by the land below it. Outer space is beyond national limits and regulations, and out here money and power prevails.
Three years ago during the Afghan war, the US Government bought all the high-definition images of Afghanistan from a private company. It shut out everybody else, including the media.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: There have been instances where the US Government, the Department of Defence, has gone to a specific commercial operator and said, "For a period of time, we want to pay - we will pay your price, name it - for exclusivity of all the data collected over a specific region of the planet.
JEFFREY RICHELSON: I guess several people felt that this action really undermined the, say, claim of the company to be able to provide imagery during crisis situations if suddenly it was all shut down and it was sort of an equivalent of what was called "shutter control", just not letting a company take pictures of certain targets.
REPORTER: There were also claims that charity groups tracking refugees were shut out.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: If we, the Department of Defence, are concerned about young Americans that we're putting in harm's way, and we want to be sure that a potentially adversary or hostile agent doesn't have information which might help them hurt Americans trying to do something we believe is in the national security interest and/or helping other people on the planet, then ethically we've probably made a pretty sound decision.
REPORTER: For the most part, satellite imaging has given the world almost godly powers, like weather forecasting and, potentially, early warnings on devastating tsunamis. But, with the global economy riding on satellites, there are signals that America's top decision makers want to unilaterally control, even dominate, space to protect military and economic interests.
DR LEONARD WEISS: On January 11th of 2001 a report was issued by a space commission that was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld that said that the United States might suffer what they called a "Space Pearl Harbour" in which our space satellites would be attacked all of a sudden by some country without our knowing that the attack was coming and that the President ought to have the ability to respond with weapons in space.
REPORTER: Donald Rumsfeld is now Secretary of Defence. The United States has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and is busy building a new ballistic missile defence system.
DR LEONARD WEISS: If you create a ballistic missile defence capability, you at the same time therefore have the capability of attacking satellites.
REPORTER: Late last year a panel of scientists chaired by Dr Weiss in Washington concluded that for the next five years at least there were no national security reasons to put weapons in space.
Like Dr Weiss, Professor Karl Grossman has been investigating the defence force agenda - in his case, for almost 20 years. He cites futuristic military documents.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: I mean, you see, for example, on "Vision 2020", you see this laser weapon shooting a beam down on Earth; this is precisely what the military wants. It wants to achieve the ultimate high ground with these weapons in space.
REPORTER: Scenarios from the armed forces are not always official defence policy, but America is worried by new threats in space: missiles from North Korea and the rise of another space superpower, China. Just how far the US is towards arming itself in outer space is again "need to know". All assets in space are supposed to be registered with the United Nations.
How accurate are the publicly available registers of assets in space, do you think?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: In terms of what they report, I think they tend to be very accurate. Do they report --
REPORTER: Is there stuff up there --
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: Everything that's up there, not necessarily.
REPORTER: High above LA's twinkling lights, Four Corners caught up with some of the amateurs who scour the night skies. This local astronomy club is bunkered down for a half night at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The dry night offers a perfect view of Saturn, but it's not just planets that keep amateurs occupied.
AMATEUR ASTRONOMER: You see satellites, lot and lots of satellites, in polar orbits and a lot of them are intelligence birds. All you know is that they're there. The orbital elements are generally well known. It's hard to put something up and actually hide it. However, particulars don't get discussed, you know, by many countries; they just don't talk about it.
REPORTER: It was amateur sleuths who first discovered America's military stealth satellites, code named "Misty", built in secret to spy on Russian military activity. Early reports claimed the satellite had broken up after launch.
So it reappeared?
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, yes, for all practical purposes, and people put two and two together and realised that this was a stealth satellite program.
REPORTER: Is it a stealth satellite program?
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Yes, yes, and then there have been two launched: the first in 1990 and the second in 1999.
REPORTER: What was the US Government's reaction to claims that it was indeed a stealth satellite?
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, no reaction because the program is classified in its entirety. So you could not get a single word out of the government as to whether this was a stealth satellite or a satellite at all.
REPORTER: Last month at a Washington convention the space industry was showing off its latest products. A growing challenge is how to deal with anti-satellite weaponry, or ASATs. No-one admits to building ASATs, but their idea is to take out the satellites that control communications and warfare.
So when you say potential attacks, do you mean jamming of --
ERIC BERANGER: Jamming. You can have also some laser attacks or some - you could have people also trying to take control of the satellites. You can imagine - you can imagine of course a nuclear blow.
REPORTER: Satellite warfare already forms part of the military's space war games. For a week in February, the US Air Force had 350 space professionals playing out a cosmic battle in the year 2020. The aim, to ensure the US maintained the ultimate high ground in space to coordinate land warfare. The game included Australia, Canada and the UK.
STEVEN FREELAND: Australia for example, even as recently as last month, was engaged in some discussions with the United States in relation to the proposed missile defence shield that the Americans are putting together. Australia may or may not play a role, but our government seems to at least be interested in playing a significant role.
REPORTER: For now, the US military denies it is actually building satellite attackers.
So there's nothing like that happening up there at the moment?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: There's nothing that the US government is pursuing to that end at the current time.
DR LEONARD WEISS: There is research going on on powerful lasers that could be used as anti-satellite weapons, and so-called space mines.
REPORTER: Who is doing this work?
DR LEONARD WEISS: Well, there is some work going on in China and we know that the Russians are doing some work in this area, and there may be some other countries as well.
REPORTER: And the US?
DR LEONARD WEISS: The United States is very definitely working on these things.
REPORTER: Anti-satellite weapons pose a major threat because their targets may be commercial satellites as well as military ones, and that could obliterate services like GPS.
JIM BENSON: Well, I think all satellites are vulnerable and around the world most countries are now highly dependant on telecommunication satellites, GPS satellites, imaging for weather and crops and resources. Anything that could occur that would take those satellites out of commission could be economically devastating for any country or the global economy because it's all so interlinked today.
STEVEN FREELAND: I think it's unfortunate, but I think at some stage there will be a conflict which involves taking out, if you like, a satellite, because satellites are already used in conflict situations for communications, for directing particular missiles through GPS technology, and it raises an interesting and difficult question as to is a satellite a legitimate target of war.
REPORTER: Blowing a satellite into thousands of pieces is a terrifying thought. Already 9,000 pieces of space debris are tracked, but there are many smaller ones, any one of which can be lethal.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: It may well benefit all of us, all of humanity, to not see warfare occur in space. Basically you could start denying some very useful Earth orbits to all of us.
REPORTER: But a bag of nails in space can be very damaging?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: It could be very damaging.
DR LEONARD WEISS: I believe it was a paint chip that nearly cracked through a window on the space shuttle during one of its flights. When you're going at over 17,000 miles an hour then, you know, even a paint chip can cause a great deal of damage.
REPORTER: There are others who claim even NASA is making space more dangerous. For some years now, NASA has been using nuclear energy to power robots and spacecraft. Unlike chemical fuels, nuclear fuel weighs almost nothing.
DR JIM GARVIN: Nuclear energy has carried spacecraft - the first time landed on Mars, for example, and operated for six years. Not bad. The power we're looking to use is actually electric propulsion powered by small-scale fission based reactors that are contained, that will be launchable even in the event of catastrophes with no damage to human beings, that will be assembled and empowered upon positive velocities away from Earth to carry vehicles and eventually we hope human beings to these other worlds. Some of them eventually may be power plants on the surfaces of Mars and potentially the moon, maybe.
REPORTER: Professor Grossman does not share the NASA vision. He sees nuclear power as one small step away from nuclear weapons in space.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: Space being nuclearised. The United States has been involved for decades now in sending nuclear devices up. Newton was quite correct: what goes up can come on our heads, and indeed there have been accidents.
NEWS ARCHIVE: The debris was recovered on Great Slave Lake, 300 kilometres east of Yellowknife. This cylinder, though not radioactive, will intrigue scientists. It's made of three metals and could tell them more about Soviet satellite construction. Armed forces film did not record the second fragment picked up nearby. But, on return to Yellowknife last night, it was revealed that object was radioactive.
REPORTER: This 1978 Soviet crash came as a shock. The satellite didn't even exist on the United Nations register. Contamination here was found to be small, but an American satellite in the 1960s was more serious.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: This satellite with its SNAP 9-A plutonium system came crashing down, disintegrated in the atmosphere, and a European report a few years later found that Plutonium-238 debris from this SNAP 9-A accident was on all continents and at all latitudes. It spread all around the Earth.
NASA's been saying, "We're just going to start up the nuclear rocket" - we're talking about an atomic-propelled rocket under the current Project Prometheus program - "once it's in a safe and stable orbit. We're just going to turn it on then, and then it'll take the astronauts to Mars and no risk to Earth." What they fail to mention is: what about the rocket coming back to Earth with the astronauts? It's going to be radioactive as hell.
DR JIM GARVIN: I believe nuclear systems will enable space exploration in ways that today we hunger for, we desire for, the entrepreneurs want. By using it in space, away from Earth in places where very few people are going, for the foreseeable future at least, and opening those doors and learning about the safety and aspects, I think we'll be more informed about how to use it capably here, and that is a vital aspect.
REPORTER: Rows over links between nuclear power and nuclear weaponry will continue. But what is disturbing: efforts by the United Nations to ban wars in outer space have so far failed.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: Well, each and every time, like, the whole world votes, "Let's broaden the Outer Space Treaty to preclude weapons in space," and the US says, "No." So it's like us kind of against the world on this.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: I am confident it is not because of an agenda where we are planning to preclude other nations or other peoples from exploiting space, and we are certainly not planning to develop Darth Vadar style death stars that would deny space to other nations.
REPORTER: Among all this military might, the entrepreneurs are out to make their buck. Jim Benson's rocket engine technology was on show on 4 October last year. The privately funded SpaceShipOne took a man 100 kilometres into space twice to win the $10,000,000 X Prize for the first private sector manned space mission.
JIM BENSON: All of a sudden you just saw this contrail just start up and it just went straight up, and everybody was yelling and cheering. I think it was about a 15 second burn and we became the first private vehicle to ever exceed the speed of sound, and we did it in 15 seconds going straight up.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I was there for both flights, and it was awesome. You know, I mean I was standing with the wife of the astronaut, the children and, you know, there was a few seconds when it was actually in space where they lost contact and, you know, I mean, it's awesome. It's obviously worrying when it's something which is completely and utterly experimental.
"The value of a ticket onto Virgin Galactic, and I'm sure all of you would like to sign up, is $200,000."
REPORTER: Sir Richard Branson is now using SpaceShipOne technology to boldly go into the space tourism business. His ship? The VSS Enterprise.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Three years from now we'll be sending paying passengers into space. We'll be sending them - you know, our spaceships will be launching every day. So we'll have five spaceships. They'll carry six passengers per spaceship. Each passenger will have an incredible view out of the spaceship. Each passenger will experience weightlessness in space. Each passenger will come back as fully qualified astronauts --
REPORTER: With their wings.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: With their wings.
REPORTER: Would you like to be a tourist and go up into space?
SPEAKER: I would love to.
SPEAKER: I would love to be, yeah.
REPORTER: Would you worry about whether you came back in one piece?
SPEAKER: Who cares?
REPORTER: Would you go up in space as a space tourist?
SPEAKER: No.
SPEAKER: No.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
REPORTER: You would.
SPEAKER: I wouldn't mind checking it out up there, see how it is.
REPORTER: Would you worry about the risks?
SPEAKER: No. If they perfect it to that point, it probably wouldn't be any more dangerous than flying.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: It's not going to be as safe as a 747. It's not going to be as safe as an Airbus A340-600, and that's something that, you know, anybody flying will have to accept. You know, I'm going up in a spaceship. My dad's going up in a spaceship. My mum's going up. My children are going up. You know, we've got to make sure it's absolutely as safe as possible. We can't have the same record as NASA, which loses four per cent of its - you know, four per cent of their astronauts.
REPORTER: If things did go wrong, however, there's not too much that ground control can do.
Would the private sector front up or would the government underwrite that, or how would that work?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Well, we have a spare spaceship. So we could send up another spaceship to try to help a spaceship that was in trouble. I'm sure that NASA, you know - NASA, if they had a craft available, would do the same. But I don't think, you know, they would actually have the right kind of craft, you know, to send up if a spaceship got into trouble.
REPORTER: Space is not for the faint-hearted. NASA's Return to Flight mission is the first shuttle launch since the Columbia crash that killed all seven astronauts. On board this July will be Australian Dr Andy Thomas. There are lives and reputations at stake.
Do you think it's realistic that within five years we could have Virgin going up in space and bringing back 1,000 or 2,000 tourists a year?
DR JIM GARVIN: Quite frankly, I don't know. I think it's whether the public want to accept that risk.
REPORTER: Sir Richard Branson's vision is much more than safe space travel. It's a whole new frontier for the Virgin franchise.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: To be sending people to space and to be the only company in the world sending people to space I suspect will propel Virgin up to, you know, be one of the best known brands in the world, if not maybe one day the best known brand in the world. And then hopefully one day, you know, to build a Virgin hotel in space and maybe, you know, have a Virgin hotel on the moon, which would be spectacular and something which we would like to aspire to.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: If you look at the intent of those international treaties to not just keep space for peace but to treat space with respect, it's pretty bad.
REPORTER: With laws still unwritten, money and physics now seem the only obstacles. But that may all change as the world becomes more paranoid about terrorism and old and new superpowers flex their muscles.
Do you think satellites will be used for good and evil?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: In terms of - no, the satellites won't. What people decide to do with the information that comes off the satellites, yes. But a glass of water is needed for life, but you can drown someone in it as well.
ERIC BERANGER: It's a very simple rule of the game: if we don't all behave, at the end of the day none of us will be able to really reap the benefits of space.
DR JIM GARVIN: I personally believe 200 years ahead our kids' kids' kids' kids' kids will look back and say, "Gosh, gee, that turn of the millennium, there were all these events in the world - tsunamis, 9/11s, whatever - and golly, gee, the Earthlings crawled off Earth and started to explore their neighbourhood a little smarter."
REPORTER: Will the optimists be right? As space becomes militarised and commercialised, the challenge will be to keep the integrity of space, at least in our part of the galaxy.
Is it fair to say that satellites are the eyes and ears in space?
DAVID RYAN: And they may even be developing a sense of smell.
JIM BENSON: They can see and hear everything.
REPORTER: So I mean --
JIM BENSON: They really can read newspapers over people's shoulders from space.
REPORTER: Outer space is no longer the exclusive realm of astronomers, astrologers and science fiction. It's the new high ground from which our lives are now run. From space orbits 36,000 kilometres away, communicators put people in contact with each other and missiles in contact with their targets.
DR JIM GARVIN: Space is a frontier. It's tangible, it's there and stuff happens, and we are in our bloody infancy of understanding it.
REPORTER: Space is also open for business for entrepreneurs with the right stuff.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Three years from now we'll be sending paying passengers into space. We'll be sending them - you know, our spaceships will be launching every day.
STEVEN FREELAND: Are there things that we should be doing and in a sense things that we should not be doing as we move forward into this frontier? These are questions, very difficult questions.
REPORTER: Tonight on Four Corners, the powerbrokers of outer space - operating in a new and almost lawless frontier.
Mary Ann Elliott is living the American Dream.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: I think the capital and everything is so pretty.
REPORTER: A former beauty queen and mother at 15, she now knows more about satellite communications than most people on the planet. She is a celebrity in the mysterious space business and a powerful player in Washington circles.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Our work with the US Government has fuelled our growth.
REPORTER: Just how much have you grown?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Over the last five years, we've grown 1,061 per cent.
REPORTER: Elliott is a space broker. Her company, Arrowhead Global Solutions, makes $100,000,000 a year, buying and selling airtime on communication satellites. And in a post-September 11 world, with a new focus on national security, that business is highly competitive.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Well, in the DC area we're called the Beltway Bandits and --
REPORTER: So this is the private sector --
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Yes.
REPORTER: Working for the federal government on - on national security?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Yes, yes absolutely, and it can be Lockheed Martin, Boeing has major presence here, Booz Allen and Hamilton, Bering Point.
REPORTER: Tonight the Beltway Bandits, their clients and competitors from across the globe are celebrating an astronomical year of business. Washington's satellite gala night is a who's who of the space business; powerful interests all cashing in.
M.C. LEADING TOAST: To our customers, long may they spend.
REPORTER: There are few household names here, but space is now the realm of big multinationals run by a new generation of high flyers like Eric Beranger, the chief executive of Space Services for Europe's largest aerospace company.
How much money is involved in space these days?
ERIC BERANGER: Wow, you mean worldwide? More than 30,000,000,000 in the US, and in Europe about a fifth of this, so between $5,000,000,000 and $6,000,000,000.
REPORTER: Per year?
ERIC BERANGER: Per year, yes.
REPORTER: Yet of the thousand guests here tonight, and just what they do, the public is completely in the dark.
If I said 'outer space', what would you think about?
SPEAKER: Star Wars - right? Am I right? Star Wars.
SPEAKER: Outer space?
SPEAKER: Far?
SPEAKER: Aliens.
SPEAKER: New York City.
SPEAKER: Let me think about this psychologically - 'outer space'.
SPEAKER: Planets, stars - everything, really.
SPEAKER: Aliens.
SPEAKER: Aliens.
SPEAKER: The Martians. Can't be more helpful than that, sorry.
SPEAKER: Venus, the Love Planet, I don't know.
SPEAKER: The outer space itself, different shows, right, some people we know, right.
SPEAKER: That's so rude.
REPORTER: In fact, our lives are run from space: banking transactions, retail chains that are networked, trades on the stock market, TV, the internet, international phone calls and GPS tracking. Space is no longer the final frontier; now it's the high frontier, in many cases beyond the reach of international laws and regulations.
A frontier with few laws suits entrepreneurs like Jim Benson. He loves fast cars and fast rockets, and is out to exploit space.
JIM BENSON: Oh, I've been called a space buccaneer. I haven't been called a space cowboy, but I kind of like the image.
REPORTER: The former dot.com guru is now a space entrepreneur in what he says is a $100,000,000,000 a year industry.
JIM BENSON: It's definitely an opportunity to make money and to make a lot of money. I have a slogan: if we want to go to space to stay space has to pay.
REPORTER: From his base in Poway, California, Benson is developing the technology to mine in outer space. His targets? Some of the 100,000,000 asteroids between Earth and Mars - and he's already designed a near-Earth asteroid prospector.
JIM BENSON: If we are going to explore and settle space, the first thing we have to look at is the natural resources. We have to learn to live off the land like the early pioneers did, and the resources are right there ready and waiting for us.
DR JIM GARVIN: There are definitely asteroids - near-Earth objects that cross the Earth's plane that are made 100 per cent of iron nickel. They're as rich as the iron nickel in the great Sudbury mine of Canada, for example. That's great. The question is: what are the economics of getting those things in a useable form back to Earth?
REPORTER: Jim Benson believes he'll have the technology. He plans to send up mining robots that would dig for asteroid ore and load up transporters. All this may seem far-fetched. But, when Jim Benson spoke at a conference in Australia about plans to stake out asteroids as his own private property, he challenged the legal fraternity.
JIM BENSON: Natural resources in space are on a first come, first served basis, and whatever private individual or corporation spends the money and takes the risks to send a robotic representative to a resource-rich body and lands on it and assesses it ought to be able to claim it.
REPORTER: What is the property law situation?
JIM BENSON: The property law situation is that there is no property law situation.
NEIL ARMSTRONG: That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.
REPORTER: The laws of space can't keep up with the cowboys. Law, such as it is, is based on United Nations agreements drafted half a century ago. Even before the famous first steps, the Outer Space Treaty was signed.
STEVEN FREELAND: We call it the Magna Carta, if you like, of space law. It is a treaty which was debated - almost as soon as Sputnik went up in 1957 the international community thought, "Oh, my goodness, we have to do something."
REPORTER: The Outer Space Treaty declares that space belongs to the whole of mankind; no country can own property. But it doesn't mention the private sector. Then in the 1970s, the United Nations drew up the idealistic Moon Agreement.
JIM BENSON: The Moon Agreement called for all profits made in space to be distributed to all countries, especially those in need, and it just was a sort of communistic approach to space that really could have put a complete damper forever on the exploration development of space.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: I mean, he claims he's a company, he's not a country. So he thinks he has a loophole. But the intent of the Moon Agreement was that we're not supposed to do that.
REPORTER: There's not much respect for the United Nations Moon Agreement. None of the big space powers - America, China and Russia - has ratified it.
JIM BENSON: Well, I just can't imagine a SpaceDev mining operation on an asteroid, you know, being attacked by a tank from the United Nations. I mean, what are they going to do?
REPORTER: Celestial real estate has already taken off. This agent is selling the moon for $59 an acre and claims to have 2,000,000 property owners. There's no law to stop this, but there's also no law to enforce moon claims.
US ESTATE AGENT: In 10 years we'll have 40,000,000 property owners on the moon. I guarantee you they will have a voice, and they will yell and scream and let these people know that they don't appreciate the fact that they're on private property.
STEVEN FREELAND: No laws, no domestic laws can be applied if you like unilaterally in space. Therefore, in a sense, there are no property rights that can be claimed by individuals or indeed by states in space because there's no law that actually regulates that.
REPORTER: The legal void in space has made the high frontier a place where it pays to be the biggest and the strongest.
Should we all be worried about this?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: It depends whether you feel that America's on your side or not, because I think America will dominate space and one then has to worry about which president I think is in power in America.
REPORTER: America is now a super power on Earth. Are they a super power in space?
ERIC BERANGER: Yes, definitely.
REPORTER: It's from here, at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, that America is pushing ahead, unconcerned about the lack of space law. Last year President Bush announced expeditions to the moon, Mars and beyond, to the delight of its top rocket man.
DR JIM GARVIN: This is our next Mars probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO. We're launching in August of this year and this is our biggest reconnaissance satellite ever to the red planet. This is of course scaled down by a factor of 15 from the real thing. It will be able to photograph things the size of small children on the surface of Mars, if there were any.
NASA is all about hope - it's a four-letter word - the hope that space will bring something better, something more interesting.
REPORTER: NASA's discoveries have given America superiority in space. It's annual $16,000,000,000 budget allows the private sector and the military to reap rewards.
KIRBY IKIN: That technology is utilised in a number of areas, both commercial, civil and military in some senses. The technologies that we develop through the NASA program end up being spun off into other areas.
REPORTER: There is a view that President Bush may be looking for select partners to support his space ambitions.
KIRBY IKIN: At this unique juncture in time, there's perhaps an imperative for the establishment of a coalition of the willing, if you will, for space exploration. We have the existing strong ties between the US president and our prime minister. It seems to me to present a unique point in time where Australia can participate in this grand exploration venture.
REPORTER: NASA's civilian space program is more than matched by the other force at the high frontier: the US military. It's this that has made Mary Ann Elliott a space millionaire.
America's Defence Daily magazine named Elliott one of the 40 most influential people in global defence. The only other woman was former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: It went very well, except I didn't get the Teleport Developer of the Year award. It went to Caprock out of Houston. They've done a lot and they're very deserving but, compared to what we've accomplished building the 22 Earth stations for DoD at six locations, it certainly pales in comparison.
REPORTER: Mary Ann Elliott sells commercial satellite time to the military. With 140,000 US troops in Iraq alone, the military's 60 satellites aren't enough. It needs the private sector.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: We now represent a significant customer. It's probably between 10 and it may even push beyond 20 per cent of the consumer or customer base for the commercial satcom industry.
REPORTER: Tonight American military pride is on show, but much of the serious space business is secret. Space defence has grown exponentially - a win-win for both client and customer.
REPORTER: You've had Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, Desert Storm.
DAVID HELFGOTT: And also in Kosovo. These were all things that took place as well.
REPORTER: And has the requirement for commercial satellites increased?
DAVID HELFGOTT: Yes.
REPORTER: It can only continue if these kind of operations continue, can't it?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: That's a true statement. That's fair.
REPORTER: America's military use of space has thrown it into conflict with the old Outer Space Treaty. It demands that space can only be developed for peaceful purposes. America argues space can and should be used for national security, and in secret. We asked for a glimpse of Mary Ann Elliott's company's control centre.
Presumably that's where the defence contracts come in and you process them and you deal with things?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: I really cannot comment.
REPORTER: This is a seriously secretive business, isn't it?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: Well, it's not that what we're doing is that classified; it's just that if people put all of the pieces of the puzzle together then they would have the full picture.
REPORTER: Do you need to know what that information is that's being transmitted?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: No, we do not.
REPORTER: Do you worry about what's in it at all?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: No, I do not. It is not my concern. It is not our business.
REPORTER: In Los Angeles, Four Corners was allowed a rare look inside the world's largest satellite factory; 1,000,000 square feet of Boeing's applied rocket science. Once complete, at around $200,000,000 apiece, these satellites will be blasted up to 36,000 kilometres into space. There's no room for error. Every solar panel is polished, every wire checked as space-worthy.
DAVID RYAN: And before you fly a satellite that has to be up for 15 years and any given day goes from about 200 degrees Fahrenheit above zero to 200 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and inside you want to keep it at room temperature, it's a very unforgiving environment.
REPORTER: Boeing was keen to show how satellites are improving life on Earth. In the pipeline are next generation weather and GPS satellites, and by 2007 satellites bringing 1,500 high-definition TV channels across the US.
But it's what you don't see that tells another story. Of the 1,000,000 square feet, this was all we were permitted to view. The rest was "need to know", much of it national security. Even the number of employees to the nearest thousand is kept confidential.
What's also secret is the intelligence capability of satellites, which may already threaten our privacy. From a few hundred kilometres up, image satellites, the eyes of space, can home in on any spot on the globe, right down to the yellow cab.
STEVEN FREELAND: Privacy is a difficult issue with space, because domestic privacy law does not necessarily apply.
DAVID RYAN: The typical commercial type of imagery is on the order of one to two metres of resolution on the ground, which is pretty remarkable since these satellites are hundreds of miles up in space.
REPORTER: And can I buy pictures?
DAVID RYAN: You can. You can go on the Internet and you can buy them. There's several companies that offer them.
REPORTER: Four weeks ago, Internet company Google launched a free service for the public. But just what the military's hawks can see is for their eyes only. We do know it's much closer.
DAVID RYAN: You can imagine that it probably is.
REPORTER: But that's classified information, is it?
DAVID RYAN: We're not going to probably talk about that too much.
REPORTER: How high are the resolutions for military satellites now?
ERIC BERANGER: They are not public --
REPORTER: They are not public.
ERIC BERANGER: ... is the answer.
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, it's somewhere under six inches, meaning that you can distinguish two objects six inches apart.
REPORTER: Intelligence expert Jeffrey Richelson does not believe satellites can quite read number plates, but Jim Benson disagrees.
JIM BENSON: You know, if a private sector company can throw up a little satellite that gives you two-foot resolution without breaking into a sweat, then you know that just by extrapolating there's much higher capability out there. They can see and hear everything.
REPORTER: So I mean --
JIM BENSON: They really can read newspapers over people's shoulders from space.
REPORTER: What most agree on is that the power of even commercial satellites will increase.
JEFFREY RICHELSON: They will come down not necessarily to the level that the best intelligence systems have, but they will come down partially because the government wants to be able to buy more commercial imagery of higher quality.
STEVEN FREELAND: I can foresee there being photos splashed on the newspapers of, if you like, famous people from satellite images at some stage, and we just will have to work out how we deal with that.
REPORTER: Privacy laws in individual countries aren't much help. Outer space, where the satellites orbit, is far beyond the boundaries of national laws. What is more, the world hasn't even agreed at what point outer space begins. Quirkily, Australia is the first country to set a limit, at 100 kilometres above sea level.
STEVEN FREELAND: That's the question that every space law student in their first class has great ideas on, and then they're shocked to hear that at least at this moment under international law there's no legally defined, if you like, demarcation between airspace and outer space.
REPORTER: Airspace for aircraft is controlled by the land below it. Outer space is beyond national limits and regulations, and out here money and power prevails.
Three years ago during the Afghan war, the US Government bought all the high-definition images of Afghanistan from a private company. It shut out everybody else, including the media.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: There have been instances where the US Government, the Department of Defence, has gone to a specific commercial operator and said, "For a period of time, we want to pay - we will pay your price, name it - for exclusivity of all the data collected over a specific region of the planet.
JEFFREY RICHELSON: I guess several people felt that this action really undermined the, say, claim of the company to be able to provide imagery during crisis situations if suddenly it was all shut down and it was sort of an equivalent of what was called "shutter control", just not letting a company take pictures of certain targets.
REPORTER: There were also claims that charity groups tracking refugees were shut out.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: If we, the Department of Defence, are concerned about young Americans that we're putting in harm's way, and we want to be sure that a potentially adversary or hostile agent doesn't have information which might help them hurt Americans trying to do something we believe is in the national security interest and/or helping other people on the planet, then ethically we've probably made a pretty sound decision.
REPORTER: For the most part, satellite imaging has given the world almost godly powers, like weather forecasting and, potentially, early warnings on devastating tsunamis. But, with the global economy riding on satellites, there are signals that America's top decision makers want to unilaterally control, even dominate, space to protect military and economic interests.
DR LEONARD WEISS: On January 11th of 2001 a report was issued by a space commission that was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld that said that the United States might suffer what they called a "Space Pearl Harbour" in which our space satellites would be attacked all of a sudden by some country without our knowing that the attack was coming and that the President ought to have the ability to respond with weapons in space.
REPORTER: Donald Rumsfeld is now Secretary of Defence. The United States has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and is busy building a new ballistic missile defence system.
DR LEONARD WEISS: If you create a ballistic missile defence capability, you at the same time therefore have the capability of attacking satellites.
REPORTER: Late last year a panel of scientists chaired by Dr Weiss in Washington concluded that for the next five years at least there were no national security reasons to put weapons in space.
Like Dr Weiss, Professor Karl Grossman has been investigating the defence force agenda - in his case, for almost 20 years. He cites futuristic military documents.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: I mean, you see, for example, on "Vision 2020", you see this laser weapon shooting a beam down on Earth; this is precisely what the military wants. It wants to achieve the ultimate high ground with these weapons in space.
REPORTER: Scenarios from the armed forces are not always official defence policy, but America is worried by new threats in space: missiles from North Korea and the rise of another space superpower, China. Just how far the US is towards arming itself in outer space is again "need to know". All assets in space are supposed to be registered with the United Nations.
How accurate are the publicly available registers of assets in space, do you think?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: In terms of what they report, I think they tend to be very accurate. Do they report --
REPORTER: Is there stuff up there --
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: Everything that's up there, not necessarily.
REPORTER: High above LA's twinkling lights, Four Corners caught up with some of the amateurs who scour the night skies. This local astronomy club is bunkered down for a half night at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The dry night offers a perfect view of Saturn, but it's not just planets that keep amateurs occupied.
AMATEUR ASTRONOMER: You see satellites, lot and lots of satellites, in polar orbits and a lot of them are intelligence birds. All you know is that they're there. The orbital elements are generally well known. It's hard to put something up and actually hide it. However, particulars don't get discussed, you know, by many countries; they just don't talk about it.
REPORTER: It was amateur sleuths who first discovered America's military stealth satellites, code named "Misty", built in secret to spy on Russian military activity. Early reports claimed the satellite had broken up after launch.
So it reappeared?
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, yes, for all practical purposes, and people put two and two together and realised that this was a stealth satellite program.
REPORTER: Is it a stealth satellite program?
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Yes, yes, and then there have been two launched: the first in 1990 and the second in 1999.
REPORTER: What was the US Government's reaction to claims that it was indeed a stealth satellite?
JEFFREY RICHELSON: Well, no reaction because the program is classified in its entirety. So you could not get a single word out of the government as to whether this was a stealth satellite or a satellite at all.
REPORTER: Last month at a Washington convention the space industry was showing off its latest products. A growing challenge is how to deal with anti-satellite weaponry, or ASATs. No-one admits to building ASATs, but their idea is to take out the satellites that control communications and warfare.
So when you say potential attacks, do you mean jamming of --
ERIC BERANGER: Jamming. You can have also some laser attacks or some - you could have people also trying to take control of the satellites. You can imagine - you can imagine of course a nuclear blow.
REPORTER: Satellite warfare already forms part of the military's space war games. For a week in February, the US Air Force had 350 space professionals playing out a cosmic battle in the year 2020. The aim, to ensure the US maintained the ultimate high ground in space to coordinate land warfare. The game included Australia, Canada and the UK.
STEVEN FREELAND: Australia for example, even as recently as last month, was engaged in some discussions with the United States in relation to the proposed missile defence shield that the Americans are putting together. Australia may or may not play a role, but our government seems to at least be interested in playing a significant role.
REPORTER: For now, the US military denies it is actually building satellite attackers.
So there's nothing like that happening up there at the moment?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: There's nothing that the US government is pursuing to that end at the current time.
DR LEONARD WEISS: There is research going on on powerful lasers that could be used as anti-satellite weapons, and so-called space mines.
REPORTER: Who is doing this work?
DR LEONARD WEISS: Well, there is some work going on in China and we know that the Russians are doing some work in this area, and there may be some other countries as well.
REPORTER: And the US?
DR LEONARD WEISS: The United States is very definitely working on these things.
REPORTER: Anti-satellite weapons pose a major threat because their targets may be commercial satellites as well as military ones, and that could obliterate services like GPS.
JIM BENSON: Well, I think all satellites are vulnerable and around the world most countries are now highly dependant on telecommunication satellites, GPS satellites, imaging for weather and crops and resources. Anything that could occur that would take those satellites out of commission could be economically devastating for any country or the global economy because it's all so interlinked today.
STEVEN FREELAND: I think it's unfortunate, but I think at some stage there will be a conflict which involves taking out, if you like, a satellite, because satellites are already used in conflict situations for communications, for directing particular missiles through GPS technology, and it raises an interesting and difficult question as to is a satellite a legitimate target of war.
REPORTER: Blowing a satellite into thousands of pieces is a terrifying thought. Already 9,000 pieces of space debris are tracked, but there are many smaller ones, any one of which can be lethal.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: It may well benefit all of us, all of humanity, to not see warfare occur in space. Basically you could start denying some very useful Earth orbits to all of us.
REPORTER: But a bag of nails in space can be very damaging?
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: It could be very damaging.
DR LEONARD WEISS: I believe it was a paint chip that nearly cracked through a window on the space shuttle during one of its flights. When you're going at over 17,000 miles an hour then, you know, even a paint chip can cause a great deal of damage.
REPORTER: There are others who claim even NASA is making space more dangerous. For some years now, NASA has been using nuclear energy to power robots and spacecraft. Unlike chemical fuels, nuclear fuel weighs almost nothing.
DR JIM GARVIN: Nuclear energy has carried spacecraft - the first time landed on Mars, for example, and operated for six years. Not bad. The power we're looking to use is actually electric propulsion powered by small-scale fission based reactors that are contained, that will be launchable even in the event of catastrophes with no damage to human beings, that will be assembled and empowered upon positive velocities away from Earth to carry vehicles and eventually we hope human beings to these other worlds. Some of them eventually may be power plants on the surfaces of Mars and potentially the moon, maybe.
REPORTER: Professor Grossman does not share the NASA vision. He sees nuclear power as one small step away from nuclear weapons in space.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: Space being nuclearised. The United States has been involved for decades now in sending nuclear devices up. Newton was quite correct: what goes up can come on our heads, and indeed there have been accidents.
NEWS ARCHIVE: The debris was recovered on Great Slave Lake, 300 kilometres east of Yellowknife. This cylinder, though not radioactive, will intrigue scientists. It's made of three metals and could tell them more about Soviet satellite construction. Armed forces film did not record the second fragment picked up nearby. But, on return to Yellowknife last night, it was revealed that object was radioactive.
REPORTER: This 1978 Soviet crash came as a shock. The satellite didn't even exist on the United Nations register. Contamination here was found to be small, but an American satellite in the 1960s was more serious.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: This satellite with its SNAP 9-A plutonium system came crashing down, disintegrated in the atmosphere, and a European report a few years later found that Plutonium-238 debris from this SNAP 9-A accident was on all continents and at all latitudes. It spread all around the Earth.
NASA's been saying, "We're just going to start up the nuclear rocket" - we're talking about an atomic-propelled rocket under the current Project Prometheus program - "once it's in a safe and stable orbit. We're just going to turn it on then, and then it'll take the astronauts to Mars and no risk to Earth." What they fail to mention is: what about the rocket coming back to Earth with the astronauts? It's going to be radioactive as hell.
DR JIM GARVIN: I believe nuclear systems will enable space exploration in ways that today we hunger for, we desire for, the entrepreneurs want. By using it in space, away from Earth in places where very few people are going, for the foreseeable future at least, and opening those doors and learning about the safety and aspects, I think we'll be more informed about how to use it capably here, and that is a vital aspect.
REPORTER: Rows over links between nuclear power and nuclear weaponry will continue. But what is disturbing: efforts by the United Nations to ban wars in outer space have so far failed.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: Well, each and every time, like, the whole world votes, "Let's broaden the Outer Space Treaty to preclude weapons in space," and the US says, "No." So it's like us kind of against the world on this.
COLONEL PATRICK RAYERMANN: I am confident it is not because of an agenda where we are planning to preclude other nations or other peoples from exploiting space, and we are certainly not planning to develop Darth Vadar style death stars that would deny space to other nations.
REPORTER: Among all this military might, the entrepreneurs are out to make their buck. Jim Benson's rocket engine technology was on show on 4 October last year. The privately funded SpaceShipOne took a man 100 kilometres into space twice to win the $10,000,000 X Prize for the first private sector manned space mission.
JIM BENSON: All of a sudden you just saw this contrail just start up and it just went straight up, and everybody was yelling and cheering. I think it was about a 15 second burn and we became the first private vehicle to ever exceed the speed of sound, and we did it in 15 seconds going straight up.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: I was there for both flights, and it was awesome. You know, I mean I was standing with the wife of the astronaut, the children and, you know, there was a few seconds when it was actually in space where they lost contact and, you know, I mean, it's awesome. It's obviously worrying when it's something which is completely and utterly experimental.
"The value of a ticket onto Virgin Galactic, and I'm sure all of you would like to sign up, is $200,000."
REPORTER: Sir Richard Branson is now using SpaceShipOne technology to boldly go into the space tourism business. His ship? The VSS Enterprise.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Three years from now we'll be sending paying passengers into space. We'll be sending them - you know, our spaceships will be launching every day. So we'll have five spaceships. They'll carry six passengers per spaceship. Each passenger will have an incredible view out of the spaceship. Each passenger will experience weightlessness in space. Each passenger will come back as fully qualified astronauts --
REPORTER: With their wings.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: With their wings.
REPORTER: Would you like to be a tourist and go up into space?
SPEAKER: I would love to.
SPEAKER: I would love to be, yeah.
REPORTER: Would you worry about whether you came back in one piece?
SPEAKER: Who cares?
REPORTER: Would you go up in space as a space tourist?
SPEAKER: No.
SPEAKER: No.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
REPORTER: You would.
SPEAKER: I wouldn't mind checking it out up there, see how it is.
REPORTER: Would you worry about the risks?
SPEAKER: No. If they perfect it to that point, it probably wouldn't be any more dangerous than flying.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: It's not going to be as safe as a 747. It's not going to be as safe as an Airbus A340-600, and that's something that, you know, anybody flying will have to accept. You know, I'm going up in a spaceship. My dad's going up in a spaceship. My mum's going up. My children are going up. You know, we've got to make sure it's absolutely as safe as possible. We can't have the same record as NASA, which loses four per cent of its - you know, four per cent of their astronauts.
REPORTER: If things did go wrong, however, there's not too much that ground control can do.
Would the private sector front up or would the government underwrite that, or how would that work?
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Well, we have a spare spaceship. So we could send up another spaceship to try to help a spaceship that was in trouble. I'm sure that NASA, you know - NASA, if they had a craft available, would do the same. But I don't think, you know, they would actually have the right kind of craft, you know, to send up if a spaceship got into trouble.
REPORTER: Space is not for the faint-hearted. NASA's Return to Flight mission is the first shuttle launch since the Columbia crash that killed all seven astronauts. On board this July will be Australian Dr Andy Thomas. There are lives and reputations at stake.
Do you think it's realistic that within five years we could have Virgin going up in space and bringing back 1,000 or 2,000 tourists a year?
DR JIM GARVIN: Quite frankly, I don't know. I think it's whether the public want to accept that risk.
REPORTER: Sir Richard Branson's vision is much more than safe space travel. It's a whole new frontier for the Virgin franchise.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: To be sending people to space and to be the only company in the world sending people to space I suspect will propel Virgin up to, you know, be one of the best known brands in the world, if not maybe one day the best known brand in the world. And then hopefully one day, you know, to build a Virgin hotel in space and maybe, you know, have a Virgin hotel on the moon, which would be spectacular and something which we would like to aspire to.
PROF. KARL GROSSMAN: If you look at the intent of those international treaties to not just keep space for peace but to treat space with respect, it's pretty bad.
REPORTER: With laws still unwritten, money and physics now seem the only obstacles. But that may all change as the world becomes more paranoid about terrorism and old and new superpowers flex their muscles.
Do you think satellites will be used for good and evil?
MARY ANN ELLIOTT: In terms of - no, the satellites won't. What people decide to do with the information that comes off the satellites, yes. But a glass of water is needed for life, but you can drown someone in it as well.
ERIC BERANGER: It's a very simple rule of the game: if we don't all behave, at the end of the day none of us will be able to really reap the benefits of space.
DR JIM GARVIN: I personally believe 200 years ahead our kids' kids' kids' kids' kids will look back and say, "Gosh, gee, that turn of the millennium, there were all these events in the world - tsunamis, 9/11s, whatever - and golly, gee, the Earthlings crawled off Earth and started to explore their neighbourhood a little smarter."
REPORTER: Will the optimists be right? As space becomes militarised and commercialised, the challenge will be to keep the integrity of space, at least in our part of the galaxy.